Issues and Debates - revision refresh

GENDER BIAS

bias may be an inevitable part of the research process - this undermines not only psychologist’s claims to being objective and value-free, but also the universality of psychology. Universality = that conclusions draw can be applied to anyone, everywhere, regardless of time or culture etc.

Alpha bias: psychological theories that overemphasise differences between women and men - typically undervalue females.

• sociobiological theory - Wilson (1975) explains human sexual attraction with the general premise that sexual promiscuity in males is natural, but in females is ‘against nature’.

Beta bias: psychological theories that ignore or minimise the differences between men and women - often occurs when female participants are used and results are assumed to be applicable to them.

• early research into the fight or flight response was conducted only on male animals and assumed to be applicable to females but Taylor et al suggest that female biology has evolved to inhibit the fight or flight response and moved towards caring.

androcentrism: potential consequence of beta bias - our understanding of what is normal behaviour is based on research that solely studies males; behaviour that deviates from this (more likely to be displayed by females) likely to be judged as abnormal or inferior/deficient by comparison. At best this leads to female behaviour being misunderstood, at worse pathologised (considered to be a sign of psychological instability)

• ‘PMS’ considered by some researchers to be a social construction that medicalises female emotions, whilst male anger is typically considered to be a natural response to external pressures.

AO3:

• sexism within the research process

  • lack of female researcher appointed at a senior level may mean female concerns are not be reflected by the research process

  • male researchers are more likely to have their research published

  • studies that find significant differences between men and women are more likely to be published - file drawer phenomenon

  • Denmark et al - psychology may be guilty of supporting a system of institutional sexism that creates bias in theory and research

• implications of gender biased research

  • may create misleading assumptions about female behaviour

  • may provide scientific justification for discrimination of women

  • Tavris - in any domain where men define what is normal, it becomes normal for women to feel abnormal

• essentialism

  • many gender differences reported by psychologists are based on an essentialist perspective - that the gender difference in question is inevitable and fixed

  • Walkerdine - reports how in 1930s ‘scientific’ research revealed that higher levels of education would harm a woman’s chances at giving birth

  • such essentialist accounts are often politically motivated arguments disguised as biological ‘facts’

CULTURE BIAS:

a tendency to ignore cultural differences and interpret all phenomena through the lens of one’s own culture. Critics argue that mainstream psychology has generally ignored culture as an important influence on behaviour and mistakenly assumes that findings from western studies can be applied to everyone all over the world.

ethnocentrism: judging other cultures by the standards and values of one’s own culture. In its extreme form it is the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture which may lead to prejudice and discrimination towards other cultures.

• Ainsworth’s ‘strange situation’ suggests that ideal attachment is characterised by infant showing moderate amounts of separation anxiety - this lead to misinterpretation of behaviour in other countries that deviated from the American norm. For example, German mothers seen as cold and rejecting rather than encouraging independence in their children.

cultural relativism: the idea that norms and values, as well as ethics and moral standards, can only be meaningful and understood within specific social and cultural contexts.

• emic - investigation of a culture within the culture itself, identifying behaviours which are specific to that culture itself

• etic - a theoretical approach assumed to apply to all cultural groups, considered to be universal to all people

  • imposed etic - where a concept from another culture is applied inappropriately to another

AO3:

• operationalisation of variables

  • variables under review may not be experienced the same by all participants

  • things like an invasion of personal space may be interpreted differently in different culture

  • this may affect interactions between researcher and participant or between western and non-western participants in cross-cultural studies

• unfamiliarity with research tradition

  • in western cultures, participants’ familiarity with general aims and objectives of scientific enquiry is assumed

  • in cultures without the same histories of research, same knowledge and ‘faith’ in scientific testing may not apply

  • demand characteristics may therefore have an exaggerated effect on validity of ‘local population’ research

• challenging implicit assumptions

  • benefit of conducting cross-cultural research - challenges our typically western ways of thinking and viewing the world

  • being able to see that certain things we take for granted are not shared with everyone may promote greater sensitivity to individual differences

  • counters the charge of ‘scientific racism’ that has been made against some psychological theories and the conclusions psychologists draw are likely to have more validity if they include recognition of the role of culture in bringing them about

FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM:

free will: the notion that humans can make choices and are not determined by biological or external forces - we are self determining and can choose our thought and actions. Does not suggest that there are no external or biological forces that influence our behaviour, but suggests we have the power to reject these. Advocated big time by the humanists.

determinism: the view that an individual’s behaviour is shaped or controlled by internal or external forces rather than an individual’s will to do something.

• hard determinism

  • ‘fatalism’, suggests that all human behaviour has cause which can be identified. Compatible with approaches of science - identifying causal laws that govern thought and action.

• soft determinism

  • all human behaviour does have a cause but there’s some wiggle room - we have conscious mental control over the way we behave. It may be the role of scientists to explain the determining forces that act upon us, but this doesn’t take away from the freedom we have to make rational conscious choice about the way we behave in everyday situations.

• biological determinism

  • emphasises role of biological forces in determining our behaviour - everything psychological is at first biological. Modern biopsychologists likely recognise the mediating influence of the environment: the nature/nurture debate

• environmental determinism

  • all behaviour is a result of conditioning. “Free will is simply an illusion” - Skinner. Our experience of ‘choice’ is merely the sum of reinforcement that has acted upon us throughout our lives. We think we are acting freely but our behaviour has been shaped by our environment

• psychic determinism

  • Freud. All our behaviour is determined and directed by unconscious conflicts, repressed in childhood, no such thing as an accident (even ‘slips of the tongue’ can be explained by the underlying authority of the subconscious.

the scientific emphasis on causal explanations: every event in the universe has a cause and causes can be explained by using general laws. Knowledge of these is important as it allows for prediction and control of future events - associated with scientific methodology and lab experiments in psychology.

AO3:

• determinism

  • FOR - consistent with the aims of science - the notion the human behaviour is orderly and obeys laws follows more established fields of science’s views. Research with this view has led to development of treatments, like antipsychotics to manage schizophrenia. Conditions where sufferers lose all control would indicate behaviour is predetermined

  • AGAINST - not consistent with the way in which the legal system operates - we view people to have made a choice to commit an offence and punish them accordingly. It is also unfalsifiable: based on the idea that causes for behaviour will always exist, even if they haven’t been found.

• free-will

  • FOR - face validity, everyday experience at least gives the impression that we have free choice over our behaviour, it makes cognitive sense. Research suggests that those who have an internal locus control - believing they have choice over their behaviour - are more mentally healthy; believing we have free will is good for us.

  • AGAINST - Siong Soon et al - brain activity predetermined outcome of simple choices, predates our knowledge of having made the choice; brain activity as to whether to press a button on the left or right occurred 10 seconds before participants reported being consciously aware of having made the decision

• compromise?

  • interactionist approach may provide us with best compromise in the debate - ‘soft determinism’

THE NATURE/NURTURE DEBATE:

concerned with the extent to which aspects of behaviour are a product of inherited or acquired characteristics.

nature: early nativists (Descartes) argued that human characteristics are innate - the result of heredity. Hereditability coefficient is used to assess this - numerical figure ranging from 0 to 1.0 (1 = completely genetically determined). General figure for IQ = 0.5, suggests both genetics and environment are important.

nurture: ‘empiricists’ such a John Locke argue that the mind is a ‘blank slate’ at birth upon which learning and experience ‘writes’ - the result of the environment. Lerner identifies levels of the environment, for example - can be both pre-natal, and external + post-natal

relative importance of heredity and environment: nature and nurture are so closely intertwined that it makes little practical sense to attempt to separate the two; for instance, in twin studies, it’s difficult to tell whether concordance is due to genetic similarity or similar upbringing

• interactionist approach likely a better way to consider the debate

• diathesis-stress model - environmental stressors will cause psychological difficulty only if genetic predisposition is there

• epigenetics - change in genetic activity without changing our genetic code - happens throughout life and is caused by interaction with environment. Aspects of our lifestyle leave marks on our DNA, these can be inherited by our children and their children. Introduces a 3rd component in nature/nurture debate - life experiences of previous generation.

  • Dias and Kelly - gave male lab mice electric shocks whenever they were exposed to the smell of acetophenone - they showed signs of fear when they smelt it after a while and so did their children and grandchildren who had not be conditioned.

AO3:

• implications

  • nativism - suggests anatomy is destiny. This has led to socially sensitive research that has attempted to link race, genetics, and intelligence. Has also been applied to eugenics policies

  • empiricism - suggesting any behaviour can be changed by altering environmental conditions has had practical applications in therapy but could lead to advocation for a model of society that controls and manipulates its citizens.

• constructivism

  • notion that genes genes and environment interact is elaborated by constructivism - people create their on nurture by selecting environments that are appropriate for their nature - ‘niche picking’ and ‘niche building’ - further support for the notion that it is illogical to attempt to separate nature and nurture.

• shared and unshared environments

  • research attempting to tease out the influence of the environment is difficult as even siblings raised by the same family may have not experienced the same upbringing - age, temperament, etc would mean that life events such as a parents divorce had different meaning to siblings. Heredity and the environment cannot be meaningfully separated.

HOLISM AND REDUCTIONISM:

holism: an argument or theory which proposes that it only makes sense to study an indivisible system rather than its constituent parts. ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’

reductionism: the belief that human behaviour is best explained by breaking it down into smaller constituent parts. ‘Parsimony’ - all phenomena should be explained using the most basic principles.

levels of explanation: suggests that there are different ways of viewing the same phenomena in psychology - some more reductionist than others. For example, OCD may be viewed in socio-cultural context - producing behaviour most find abnormal or at a physiological level - underproduction in serotonin. Psychology itself can be placed within a hierarchy of science.

biological reductionism: attempts to explain social and psychological phenomena at a lower biological level - actions of genes and hormones etc. Application to areas such as drug treatments.

environmental (stimulus response) reductionism: attempt to explain all behaviour in terms of stimulus-response links that have been learned through experience. Not concerned with cognitive process - views mind as a ‘black box’ irrelevant to our understanding of behaviour.

AO3:

• holism

  • FOR - often aspects of behaviour that only emerge within a group context and cannot be understood at level of individual group members - like conformity behaviours - it is the interactions between people that are important. Provide a more complete and global understanding of behaviour than reductionist approaches.

  • AGAINST - tend not to lend themselves to rigorous scientific testing - can become vague and speculative. Presents practical dilemma - accepting that there are many interacting causes makes researching them difficult.

• reductionism

  • FOR - forms the basis of scientific research in order to create operationalised variables, therefore possible to conduct experiments or record observations in a way that is meaningful. Greater scientific credibility for psychology

  • AGAINST - accused of oversimplifying complex phenomena leading to a loss of validity - reductionists views can only ever form part of an explanation

IDIOGRAPHIC AND NOMOTHETIC APPROACHES:

idiographic approach: attempts to describe the nature of the individual, people are studied as unique entities - each with their own subjective experiences, motivations, and values. Associated with methodology like unstructured interviews and case studies. Aims to describe the richness of the human experience and gain insight into the person’s unique way of viewing the world.

• humanism - phenomenological approach to the study of human beings.

• psychodynamic approach - a balance between the two - use of case study method etc; but Freud also assumed he was producing general laws of behaviour

nomothetic approach: produce general laws of human behaviour to provide a benchmark against which people can be compared, classified - future behaviour can then be predicted and/or controlled. Aligned with methodology that would be described as scientific - study a large number of people to establish ways in which they are similar.

• tends to be a feature of approaches that are reductionist and/or deterministic

• much of research conducted by cognitive, behaviourist, and biological approaches fit criteria for the nomothetic approach

  • hypotheses are rigorously tested, statistically analysed and general laws of behaviour are proposed and developed

AO3:

• idiographic

  • FOR - provides complete and global accounts of individual - this may complement the nomothetic approach by shedding further light on general laws. A single case could generate hypotheses for further study

  • AGAINST - narrow and restricted nature of their work - meaningful generalisations cannot be made without further examples. Methods associated with the idiographic approach tend to be open to bias as the results require interpretation from the researcher.

• nomothetic

  • FOR - standardised scientific conditions + ability to establish general rules = higher scientific credibility.

  • AGAINST - accused of losing the concept of the whole person - knowing that there is a 1% chance of developing schizophrenia doesn’t tell us anything about what life is like for someone suffering from schizophrenia. Subjective experience of individuals ignored by much nomothetic research - in its search for generalities, the nomothetic approach may sometimes overlook the richness of the human experience.

ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH STUDIES AND THEORIES:

ethical implications: the impact that psychological research may have in terms of the rights of other people especially participants. This includes, at a societal level, influencing public policy and/or the way in which certain groups of people are regarded - social impact of research.

socially sensitive research: ‘studies in which there are potential consequences or implications, either directly for the participants or for the class of individuals represented by the research.’ Studies that tackle ‘taboo’ areas.

ethical issues in socially sensitive research: Sieber and Stanley identify concerns that researchers should be mindful of when conducting socially sensitive research.

• implications - wider effects of such research should be carefully considered; may be seen as giving scientific credence to prejudice and discrimination

• uses/public policy - what is the research likely to be used for - what would happen if it was used for the wrong purpose

• validity of the research - findings that, in the past have been presented as value-free and objective ‘facts’ have turned out to be false or highly impacted by bias

AO3:

• benefits of socially sensitive research

  • study of underrepresented groups and taboo topics may promote greater sensitivity and understanding. Can help reduce prejudice and encourage acceptance.

  • has applications - research into the accuracy of eyewitness testimony = fewer miscarriages of justice

• cost benefit analysis

  • should be considered by research and may also be examined by an ethics committee

  • however, some of the consequences of research can be difficult to anticipate - how responsible for these should the researcher be - can they be expected to foresee everything that could occur as a result of the publication of their findings?

• social control

  • in 20s and 30s America a large number of US states enacted legislation that led to the compulsory sterilisation of citizens expressing certain characteristics that caused them to be deemed ‘feeble minded’

  • this was supported by psychological research such as that by Goddard - used to ‘prop up’ discriminatory practice.